Greenhouse

The sun never came out today, the valley is still blanketed in a thick cover of clouds. Everyone is excited because the forecast showed a confident 100% chance of rain for tomorrow. Still haven’t made up my mind if I’m as excited as everyone else, I know rain makes for damp clothes and muddy shoes…

But I guess I did spend most of today in a wet state so it really shouldn’t make much difference. I spent all day working around the greenhouse today. First we took a tedious half hour to separate and clean all the flats and then we spent the rest of the day seeding. Every day I work I find a different thing that is my new favorite thing to do. Today working with seeds all day I grew really interested in the idea of seed saving and greenhouses. Working there with Rebecca and Chica (the Mexican worker in charge of the greenhouse planting) I could all of a sudden imagine myself working in a nursery. The seeding machine that we used was also really impressive: basically it’s a vacuum that you attach a metal tray to. The tray has little holes in it so when you pour seeds on to it they stick to the holes. Then flip the tray upside down and line it up above the flat you turn the vacuum off and the seeds fall perfectly into the flats. Presto! So so so so much faster than hand sowing.

After sowing 90 flats of chard (red, green, and gold) and 30 flats of parsley (Italian and curly), we ran out of flats so we had to make more soil mix and clean and fill more flats. The cleaning of the flats is the most annoying because when they are stored they get stuck together so you spend a long time trying to peel them apart (being careful not to rip them) and then you get wet when you have to spray them off. After they’re clean you have to fill them with soil mix that you have to make. But that part was really fun, the whole time I imagined I was baking a cake for a giant because you mix all the nutrients and soils in a huge vat with shovels and stir everything around until it’s evenly distributed. Mixing together the vermiculite, perlite, peat, phosphate and other ingredients that I can’t remember right now was like mixing batter for a huge cake. When that was done we filled more flats and started sowing seed again. In the end we only finished onion and broccoli but tomorrow we’ll start on the 130 flats of tomatoes…